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Stewed Rabbit
(Coniglio in umido) After washing the rabbit, cut it in rather large pieces and put it on the fire to drive away the water that is to be drained. When quite dry, put in the saucepan a piece of butter, a little oil, and a hash composed of the liver of the rabbit itself, a small piece of corned beef and some onion, celery, carrot and parsley. Season with salt and pepper. Stir often and when it is browned add some tomato sauce and another piece of butter. 53
A terse Italian braise that assumes you already know how long a rabbit takes. The written method stops at the point where the tomato goes in, so the cook has to supply the rest.
- The hinge: dry the meat firstPutting the cut rabbit "on the fire to drive away the water" means searing it dry in the empty pan until the liquid it throws off has evaporated and the pieces begin to colour. Skip this and the soffritto steams rather than browns, and the finished sauce tastes thin.
- "Corned beef" is a translation artifact"Corned beef" is probably a translation artifact -- the English almost certainly renders carnesecca, the Tuscan term for salt-cured pork belly, rather than brined beef. Use pancetta or, failing that, unsmoked salt pork, about 2 oz finely chopped. Tinned corned beef will not behave the same way.
- The hash is a soffrittoLiver, cured pork, onion, celery, carrot and parsley all chopped fine together — a battuto that melts into the sauce. Chop the liver last and keep it small; it thickens and darkens the gravy as it cooks out.
- Missing timingNo cooking time is given. After the tomato sauce goes in, add enough stock or water barely to cover, cover the pan and simmer gently 45-60 minutes for a young farmed rabbit, until the meat pulls from the bone. A wild rabbit may want 90 minutes.
- Tomato sauceRead this as a plain home-made cooked sauce of tomatoes with a little aromatic rather than a seasoned pasta sauce from a jar. About a cup, or a 14 oz tin of tomatoes crushed, gives roughly the right proportion.
- Rabbit size and yieldA whole farmed rabbit runs 2.5-3 lb and serves four. Cut it into eight or so pieces: two forelegs, two hind legs, the saddle in two or three, and the ribs. Some butchers sell rabbit without the liver — ask for it, or the hash loses its backbone.
- ServingThe second piece of butter stirred in near the end is what gives the sauce gloss. Serve with soft polenta or with bread to take up the sauce.
In umido is the standard Italian term for anything stewed in a small amount of liquid, often but not necessarily tomato-based, as distinct from roasting or frying; the phrase turns up throughout nineteenth-century Italian domestic cookery. The compression here is characteristic of a style that assumed a reader who had watched somebody cook. Rabbit was ordinary food across most of Italy, fed on scraps, quick to breed, and killed at home, allowing the cook to have the animal's own liver on hand. The "corned beef" looks like a translator's stumble over carnesecca, a Tuscan word for cured pork belly that may have had no obvious English equivalent, a small reminder of how much such translations had to improvise their vocabulary.